I like to tell people how I've been blogging since before it was called blogging. Technically, its not true- I started my first website (on Angelfire!) in 2000, and the term "blog" was coined in 1999 - but what "blogging" meant back then was more like what people put on social media now, and what I was doing then was much more like what "blogging" tends to mean now.

Anyway.

Once my web development chops progressed from hand-coding HTML pages on Angelfire to setting up a web server and running my own CMS, I noticed something about the way my CMS was designed that was influencing what I was writing.

These days, its pretty standard to use Google Analytics to measure your website's traffic, but back then all my posts had a counter to tell me how many people had read it.

I'm not talking about those "hits" counters that really old websites all had (along with marquee text, blink, animated gifs etc.) - this was an internal thing that only showed up if you were logged in.

I switched it off. It was surprisingly difficult, and involved hacking into the CMS code for some reason or other, but I realised pretty quickly that I didn't want it. Because I realised pretty quickly that the thing I really liked about writing (as my kind of blogging was called back then) was the way it made me think about what I was writing.

The point of writing for me was always more about my own thinking than anything. If I was facing numbers telling me that Post X had been read 200 times and Post Y had only been read 20 times, then I figured that would only make me more likely to write about whatever Post X was about. Not only do I not particularly want to spend time going into the analytics and trying to "build an audience", I realised that I very specifically wanted not to know about what I was doing that was "driving engagement".

Obviously this was in a different era, culturally speaking. Today, my kids are watching educational TV about how the "like" counters on social media affect the way the content is perceived. Facebook are thinking about removing the "like" counters from posts.

But an interesting side-effect that I didn't really forsee is that this has changed the way I write blog post titles. Usually, the idea is that you write a title that will draw in the readers - which isn't quite the same as "clickbait", although I'm not really sure I could articulate the difference.... But for what I'm doing, I'm more interested in a title that either summarises the post or (my preference) makes perfect sense- but only after you've read it, so if I'm looking through a list of my post titles, I can find the one that I want.

So if you were wondering why my post titles are so bad... its not that they are 'bad' - they are just maybe doing a different job to what headlines "normally" do.

Which... is a bit of a weak conclusion to this post, but reminded me of a good story about "breaking the rules" from Dan Hon's (excellent) newsletter which is only vaguely connected (in that there is something about friction - or making things easy, and "building communities" being about the kind of people you want in your community, which feels vaguely analagous to not writing for an audience of people who probably aren't really interested in what you're writing about for the sake of getting 'hits'), but you should totally read it.

Some Random Nerd